In a follow-up to a post I had on lawyer soliciations, Carolyn Elefant directs us to this site, discussing lawyer solicitation in more depth. There is a link to a Newsday article saying that 6 personal injury lawyers in New York have been charged with criminal enterprise corruption, bribery and other crimes as a result of using "runners" within hospitals to steer clients toward those lawyers. This is the worst cliche associated with personal injury lawyers: you pay a couple of hundred dollars per case to a guy and he goes around to the hospitals to try to sign up clients for you.

I have heard about runners all my career, and I have known lawyers who paid people to go troll for cases. It is a particularly slimy practice and, as indicated myshingle.com, as often as not it will not result in getting the case. It's tacky, disrespectful to the potential client, unethical, and by the way, illegal as hell. Running a case is cheating. As demonstrated by those New York lawyers who may be guests of the state for many years, cheaters never prosper.